Power in international relations

The United States must recognize once again, and permanently, that the power constellation in Europe and Asia is of everlasting concern to her, both in time of war and in time of peace. The U.S. will continue to depend primarily on its own national strength, for the failure of a great state to consider power means its eventual destruction and conquest. It has meant the downfall of all the empires that have been tempted by the flabby ease of unpreparedness. States are always engaged in curbing the force of some other state.

In a world of international anarchy, foreign policy must aim above all at the improvement or at least the preservation of the relative power position of the state. Power is in the last instance the ability to wage successful war, and in geography lay the clues to the problems of military and political strategy. The territory of a state is the base from which it operates in time of war and the strategic position which it occupies during the temporary armistice called peace. Geography is the most fundamental factor in the foreign policy of states because it is the most permanent. Sound foreign policy, and the design of its effecting instruments, can flow only from a secure grasp of appropriate premises for thought, declaration, and action.

There are many possible frameworks for the attempted understanding of international relations; all are not of equal worth for the comprehension of the more important features of world political processes. The academic study of international relations has taken off into self-sustained growth in a direction very largely irrelevant to what one must call the real world. This easily-demonstrated fact does not detract from the importance of other processes, sometimes only distantly related, that are eroding familiar structures in international relations.

(1829)